The rules

A restaurant qualifies if either of the first two is true:

1. It calls itself a steakhouse — in its name, on its website, or in its own materials.
2. Its menu is built around à la carte steak sold by weight, with sides ordered separately, and it takes its cocktails and wine seriously.

That second rule lets in a few places that would never use the word, and keeps out a number of restaurants that merely sell a good steak.

And the third has to be true as well:

3. It serves the tenderloin — either as a filet mignon, or as part of a porterhouse. The same order has to be placeable, or there is nothing to compare.

The last rule sounds pedantic and is the most useful one. The filet is worth 30 points, the largest single share of the score. Somewhere that cannot serve one cannot be scored against somewhere that can — not because it is worse, but because it is not answering the same question.

The porterhouse clause exists because of Peter Luger, whose menu lists no cuts at all: steak for two, steak for three, steak for four. There is no filet to order. There is, however, a filet — it is the smaller side of the T-bone, dry-aged and broiled like everything else on the plate. Where a restaurant has no standalone filet, that is what gets scored, and the review says so.

What the rule excludes is a kitchen that has decided not to serve tenderloin at all. Hanger, flatiron, Denver, skirt, rib eye and strip are all fine steaks and none of them is a filet. A steak restaurant serving only those is telling you what kind of restaurant it is.

The kosher exception

There is one case where that rule would do exactly the wrong thing. The tenderloin sits in the hindquarter, and in America the hindquarter is generally not koshered — removing the sciatic nerve and the forbidden fats is painstaking work that is rarely done here. A kosher steakhouse cannot sell you a filet mignon however good the kitchen is. It is the same reason the "Roumanian tenderloin" at Sammy's is, and always has been, skirt steak.

Throwing out every kosher steakhouse in New York on a technicality of butchery would be absurd. They stay, scored on the closest cut the kitchen does serve — usually what the menu calls a chateaubriand — and the substitution is disclosed on the review, on the scorecard and in the filet ranking. You will always be able to see which score was measured on what.

The line is between cannot and will not. Le Marais would serve a filet if American kosher butchery produced one. St. Anselm has decided it is a hanger-and-flatiron restaurant. Only the second of those is a reason to leave somewhere off the list.

See who these rules keep out →

• Every meal is paid for in full. No comps, no press dinners, no sponsorships.
• Reservations are made under a normal name.
• The filet is ordered medium rare, every time.
• Scores are published as recorded on the night. They are not revised later.
• one steakhouse every two weeks, published here.